Staff Backend Engineer - Top of Funnel

The Top of Funnel team is key to user growth. By combining our knowledge of search engines, with an eye for the best user experiences we have the opportunity to introduce Reddit to new and unfamiliar users and transform them into deeply engaged users. 

We’re looking for a backend engineer who is comfortable taking on the end-to-end delivery & technical leadership of complex services.

Location:

Reddit has a flexible first workforce! if you happen to live close to our physical office location our doors are open for you to come into the office as often as you'd like. Don't live near one of our offices? No worries: You can apply to work remotely from the UK, Ireland or the Netherlands.

Problem Spaces You’ll Work In: 

• User Growth: This involves strategizing and implementing initiatives to attract and onboard new users to the platform. This includes optimizing the signup process, improving user landing experience, and exploring and leveraging marketing channels to drive traffic and acquire new users.  

• Reddit Logged Out Experience: This encompasses everything that users see, touch, and interact with before they log in to Reddit. Optimizing this experience is crucial for attracting new users and retaining existing ones.

• SEO: This involves improving the platform's search engine optimization so that Reddit content can be well-represented in search results. This includes optimizing content, improving site linking architecture, scaling crawling and indexing from 3rd Party search engines to ensure that they can effectively crawl and index Reddit content.  

What You’ll Do:

• Lead key technical and design decisions across all areas mentioned above.

• Work cross-functionally with product, design, and other engineering counterparts to execute on product and business strategy and build novel products and features that our users will love.

• Contribute to the full development cycle: technical design, development, test, experimentation, analysis, and launch. You’ll be reviewing code and design docs, giving feedback on product specs and mocks.

• Contribute meaningfully to team strategy. We give everyone a seat at the table and encourage active participation in planning for the future. Don’t just come along for the ride.

• Participate with a team of thoughtful, fast-moving, and motivated engineers. Contribute to standards that improve developer workflows, recommend best practices, and help mentor junior engineers on the team to grow their technical expertise.

• Move fast while balancing quality. We can’t afford extensive processes, and we also can’t afford show-stopping bugs. We need someone who can balance speed with quality while quickly building brand-new products.

What We Are Looking For:

• BS degree in Computer Science, a similar technical field of study or equivalent practical experience

• 5+ years of industry experience in large-scale distributed systems. 

• 8+ years of hands-on, professional software development experience in one or more general purpose programming languages (Go, Python, Ruby, Java, C++)

• Experienced with GraphQL, REST, HTTP, Thrift basics, and the ability to design and implement maintainable APIs

• Experienced with distributed caching layers, and distributed large scale data storage systems like Cassandra.

• A track record of developing and improving highly scalable and reliable serving systems

• Experience mentoring engineers, owning team processes, and leading cross-functional projects is preferred.

• Strong organizational skills, the ability to prioritize tasks and to deliver projects on schedule

• Entrepreneurial spirit. You are self-directed, innovative, and biased towards action in fast-paced environments. You love to build new things and thrive in ambiguity and even failure

• Excellent communication skills. You partner effectively with teams in a fully remote environment and discuss complex topics with technical and non-technical audiences

What Sets You Apart:

• You’ve worked at a social platform or consumer-focused company, designing and scaling backend systems at massive scale.

• You bring an understanding of the intersection of Backend with AI/ML on user-facing products.

• You’re equally comfortable diving into codebases as you are making high-level architectural decisions.

• You’re a thought leader and collaborative partner who thrives on tackling complex technical challenges.

• Knowledge in data engineering including design, development and implementation of complex systems and data pipelines. 

  • Experience working with data streaming/batch solutions such as Kafka, Flink, Spark, Storm, or others. 

Benefits:

• Private Medical, Dental and Vision Benefits 

• Personal Retirement Savings Account with matching contribution

• Family Planning Support

• Gender-Affirming Care

• Mental Health & Coaching Benefits

• Cycle to Work and Tax Saver schemes

• Flexible Vacation & Reddit Global Days Off